Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, January 18, 2000

2000-01-18 04:00:00 PDT VALLEJO -- State officials are trying to bar a Bay Area special-education teacher from California classrooms because, they say in court papers, he fondled his emotionally disturbed students.

Larry Allen Love, 54, of Vallejo has been ordered to turn in his teaching credential by Thursday. Love can appeal the state order, but, so far, he has not indicated what he plans to do. He has not been charged in a criminal case and is not in custody.

Love came under scrutiny by investigators in the state attorney general's office after a 1996 tip from his adopted son to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. The commission decided two years ago to revoke his credential, but when Love appealed, the attorney general stepped in to handle the case.

The whole matter was heard in October and November before the state Office of Administrative Hearings in Oakland, where a judge ruled he should be barred from the classroom, effective Thursday.

The 13-page ruling by Administrative Law Judge Michael C. Cohn says Love repeatedly discussed sexually explicit subjects with his young students and touched them in special-education classes in Oakland, Pacifica, Mountain View and San Jose. Special education is a term applied to students who have learning disabilities or emotional problems, or both.

In a letter to the court, Love denied the accusations. Love did not immediately return several calls. Nor did he reply to e-mail requests for an interview.

Cases such as Love's are rare in California. The credentials of only 71 of the state's 300,000 teachers were revoked or suspended for inappropriate contact with children during the 1998-99 school year, said Barbara Moore of the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

At Skyline High School in Oakland two years ago, court records show, Love made boys stand between his legs at the computer, rubbed their backs, and took them for long drives in his van during school hours.

Prosecutors also accuse Love, in court filings, of yelling obscenities at his students and bringing sexually explicit magazines to class.

Colleagues told investigators they were horrified when Love brought a violent video game, Mortal Kombat, for his class of emotionally troubled students to play at Westview Elementary School in Pacifica.

"He would read stories from the newspaper about rape and murder to students with emotional problems. It was bizarre,'' said Donna McCallum, Love's former teacher trainer at Ocala Middle School in San Jose. After a month at the school, he was asked to leave, she said.

Most of Love's assignments were one-year contract jobs, allowing him to slip through the system undetected, Deputy Attorney General Teresa Stinson said. "It's no coincidence he's chosen to work with the most emotionally vulnerable children in our schools," she said. "On his applications, he never admitted he was asked to leave district after district. He manipulated his way along."

Background checks never caught up with him either, because school districts, fearful of lawsuits, do not provide much more than basic information to inquiring employers, she said.

In an October letter to the court, Love denied all accusations of sexual misconduct and asked the courts to discredit the prison inmate who turned him in to the state -- his 32-year-old adopted son. It was not clear yesterday why his son was in prison. Love asserted that he had been denied due process of law and therefore could not "in good conscience participate in these proceedings."

During the proceedings in Oakland, Love chose to represent himself before the judge. He missed all but one day of the five-day administrative hearing.

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His son said in his letter from Lancaster State Prison that Love beat and sexually abused him when he was a boy, Stinson said.

Love has never been convicted of any sex crime, but juvenile and family law judges have barred him from any contact with his four children -- two adopted and two biological -- amid allegations from social workers and the mothers that he sexually abused his children in the early 1980s, Stinson said.

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